Debugging Assembly Code (Intel 8086)

I'm in an Assembly class focusing on the intel 8086 architecture (all compiling / linking / execution comes from running DOS on win7 via DOS-Box).

I've finished programming the latest assignment, but as I have yet to program any program successfully the first 开发者_JAVA百科time through, I am now stuck trying to debug my code.

I have visual studio 2010 and was wondering if there was some built in feature that would help me debug my assembly code, specifically, I'm looking to track the value of a variable.

Failing that, instructions pointing to a DOS-Box debugger (and instructions!) would be much appreciated. (I think I've been able to run codeview debug, but I couldn't figure out how to do what I was looking for).

You are generating 16-bit code, you have to break into a museum to find better tooling. Try Borland's, maybe the debugger included with Turbo C.

Yes, indeed, you can use the debugger in VS to examine pretty much everything. Irvine's site has a section specifically on using the debugger here. You can examine registers, use the watch window, etc. He also has a guide for highlighting asm keywords if you need that.

Edit: as Hans pointed out, if you are using 16-bit instead of 32-bit protected, you'll need different tools. There are several choices, listed here.

Borland's tools for DOS were called tasm, tlink, and tdebug.